Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (2 Players ver UDA)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time is Konami’s 1991 arcade beat ’em up, here represented by the U.S. two-player UDA version. It follows the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles coin-op and draws chiefly on the 1987 animated series. Konami developed and published the game for arcades, turning the team’s fight against Shredder and the Foot Clan into a fast, side-scrolling action game built for two people to play together at the same cabinet.

The story begins when Krang’s forces steal the Statue of Liberty and Shredder taunts the Turtles over a television broadcast. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael take the chase through New York, but a time warp sends them away from their own era. Their route moves through a deliberately cartoon-like set of time periods as they try to stop Shredder’s plan and return home. The journey links city streets and sewers with prehistoric, pirate, and Old West settings, allowing the arcade game to vary its scenery without abandoning its comic-book energy.

In this two-player configuration, each player selects from all four Turtles before the action starts. A joystick handles movement, while attack and jump buttons support the game’s basic combat. Straightforward button-and-direction combinations add useful options such as running, sliding or dashing attacks, airborne strikes, and a special move. Repeated hits can set up a stronger attack, and a signature mechanic lets a player grab a Foot Soldier and hurl the enemy into other opponents. Pizza pickups restore health, so pushing forward through crowded encounters is balanced by watching for valuable recovery items.

Each stage sends the Turtles through waves of Foot soldiers and other familiar adversaries before a boss encounter. The arcade roster includes characters such as Baxter Stockman, Metalhead, Leatherhead, Tokka and Rahzar, Super Krang, and Shredder. That structure keeps the objective clear: clear the screen, survive the hazards, defeat the boss, and continue the time-travel pursuit. The four heroes share the same fundamental controls but have different strengths and weaknesses, so the selection can influence how a player approaches groups of enemies and close-range confrontations.

Turtles in Time was issued both as a dedicated four-player arcade cabinet and as a two-player conversion kit; this entry is specifically the two-player U.S. revision rather than a four-player cabinet dump. That distinction matters because the two-player version allows character selection, whereas the four-player layout assigns the Turtles to positions on the control panel. It is also the original arcade release, not the Super NES adaptation released the following year. The console version added and changed content, including a Technodrome stage, different boss arrangements, additional modes, and other presentation changes, so those features are not part of this arcade description.

The game’s audiovisual presentation was designed to echo the animated Turtles world, with colorful scrolling locations, exaggerated enemy action, spoken character lines, and music composed for the arcade release by Mutsuhiko Izumi. Its time-travel premise gave Konami a way to expand on the formula of the first arcade game while keeping the immediate, cooperative brawling at the center. The original arcade title later appeared in emulated form in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare and was included alongside its Super NES counterpart in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, preserving both distinctly different versions for later audiences.